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When a student is in crisis, the hardest problems are easier to solve when someone already knows their story, and trust is already there. 

The heart of New York City’s initiative are the caring adults in schools who check in with students living in temporary housing, build relationships with families and help connect them to support during difficult moments.

The success of this initiative has reinforced for me how relationships need infrastructure behind them to translate into system-wide change.

Every public school and shelter in NYC has access to the , a planning, case-management and interagency operations platform. It’s built to let school teams, shelters and partner organizations do the daily work of moving individual students toward promotion, graduation and postsecondary outcomes.

The Portal integrates student data from NYC Public Schools with families’ shelter information from the Department of Homeless Services, helping school staff better understand how to support students living in temporary housing conditions. The ECFIK initiative builds additional features and functionality into the Portal by supporting the day-to-day work of caring adults — social workers, teachers and other school staff who volunteer to serve as the primary point of contact for a student in temporary housing. This allows these adults to document check-ins, coordinate referrals and access key information in one centralized place.

Families experiencing housing instability are often already carrying enormous burdens. The last thing they need is to repeatedly retell painful situations to different people because systems are disconnected. Having one caring adult serve as a single point of contact solves part of the problem, freeing families from having to navigate a rich but labyrinthine system of available resources across nonprofits and agencies throughout NYC. 

Technology addresses the other part of the problem. Better coordination helps preserve a family’s dignity. It allows schools and support staff to meet families with greater care and continuity, giving families the sense that people are really working together on their behalf and are coming to each interaction prepared to meet their needs. School staff cannot support students and families effectively — and thereby maintain trust and strong relationships — if critical information is fragmented across systems, buried in email attachments or dependent on staff chasing down phone numbers and updates from multiple places.

Importantly, the initiative’s integration with the Portal ensures that students’ needs and plans for support do not live in separate systems disconnected from the rest of the educational experience. A student needing clean laundry should rise to the same level of importance as a failed state exam, and the initiative makes that visibility happen.

Within the portal, caring adults and school staff see student support information alongside attendance patterns, academic performance and other school data, all following strict data privacy protocols and permission rules that respect students’ privacy and limit information to the adults who are supporting them. Having plans and outcome data living together allows schools to respond in real time instead of reacting too late and to pivot if an intervention doesn’t work. 

Caring adults all using a common platform designed with and for them also allows central program leaders to identify patterns, such as how families’ needs change in the last 10 days of the month or how the resources families seek differ across neighborhoods and boroughs. Instead of information living in scattered, static spreadsheets on individual computers, the data becomes a real-time tool to support deeper system-level understanding and action. 

An of the initiative’s first year found that the students involved experienced stronger academic performance and fewer mid-year transfers when compared to similar students who weren’t in the program. In elementary school that translated into a 8.8 percentage point gain in math. In surveys and focus groups, caring adults reported stronger relationships with families and a shift in school culture toward more empathy and support for students experiencing homelessness.

Beyond the data, the initiative has seen caring adults respond to needs both large and small, making life-changing impacts for their students’ families. One caring adult helped a family experiencing domestic violence secure relocation support after hours during a moment of crisis. Another helped a mother get haircuts for her two sons so they could return to school feeling confident. Many others have been the sole reason a student showed up to school that day: Because someone cared about them, was expecting them, was ready to listen if they needed anything. Because they felt known. 

The Portal didn’t get those boys their haircuts. It didn’t take the midnight phone call. It didn’t sit with a mother and figure out what comes next.

What the portal did was make sure that when someone was ready to do those things, they weren’t starting from zero.

That’s the part I care about. Not the software itself, but what it makes possible: that caring adults got to spend their attention on a family instead of on a spreadsheet.

That is what this initiative represents to me: technology that works behind the scenes, so the relationships front and center can hold and transform the trajectory of a family’s outcomes, one check-in at a time.

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